momtomb by WN from france

"On the edge of a field during the hazy harvest a table has been carefully set just for us. Every angle left has been rounded off, polished or softened in order for us to feel confortable around this table. The table is now ready at the end of Church street. Within the enclosure of a derelict parish overlooking a small village there is a secret agreement between generations not yet past and the present one. Our coming was expected.

A kind of mirthful profanation has entered Mons-en-Montois – sometimes called Snow Hill – whose cemetery has now a dinner made out of stone : a tribute to the living standing proudly on top of the dead. It took three years of a timeless life for Wolfgang Natlacen to extract the grand idea of momtomb out of six tons of hard limestone. Three years of a genuine complicity with his mother the artist Patricia Legrand to come to terms with the original concept of anticipated bereavement .

The fact of introducing the notion of appetite or desire – which the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan called the « miam-miam » meaning literally yummy-yummy - within the district of the dead exhibits our unsociable sociability by which we abolish the dull pomp one still engages with the deceased. Bereavement becomes digestible at last. Thus it is clear that Momtomb is everything but a tomb though yet it mixes the
Victorian decadence of mourning art with the post-modern rituals of eat art." (Adrian O. Smith)